Tag: Search Marketing

Just this morning, we sat in on a webinar titled, “PPC Negative Keywords: Maximizing the Positive Effect”. It was hosted by Marin Software and Ken Jurina, the co-founder and CEO of of Epiar, Inc. Here are some of the gems we plucked from our experience – some we know, but some of it was a kick in the pants to spend more time thinking negative.

An interesting reverse logic idea that was mentioned: you may want to consider using negative keywords for legitimate terms. Maybe these terms are spending a lot of money and bringing lots of traffic but they are expensive and converting poorly. Other great reasons to use negative keywords are:

Expensive conversions

Expensive clicks

Limited budget

Bad brand association

Not relevant for the user

Quality improvements

Lowering costs

An important, sometimes hard to find tidbit for each of the search engines is: What are their negative keyword limits?

With Google – 10,000 negative keywords in Ad Campaign or 5,000 at Ad Group Level

A major lesson seemed to be that ultimately, a combination of exact phrase broad and maximized negative keywords is the best way to target paid search. Keep in mind that negative keywords have no impact on exact match terms.

So – I’m sold on the idea of switching to more broad and phrase matching and adding negative keywords to all of my accounts. After adding broad and phrase match and negative keywords, what can I expect?

Your ads will now appear on the relevant long tail phrases

Your ads will get better exposure to better prospects, which means increased leads and increased revenue!

You can now advertise on long tail phrases where your competitors dare not tread, meaning more cheap clicks for you without the dangers of broad match.

Once your ads get impressions deep into the long tail phrases, your advertising reach may double, triple, or more!

OK – great, now how do I build these lists? What tools are there for me to use?

Manually, using intuition and industry knowledge.

Scan through past referring phrases that did not convert, had bounce rates or were trash

When it comes to paid and organic search results, many experts have their opinions on which is more effective. Many studies have shown that Internet users are more likely to click on the first few organic search results than the pay per click advertisements. This does not mean that PPC ads are without benefits. So, why does one have to be better than the other? Most industry experts believe that it is important to focus efforts on both paid ads and organic search in order to maximize your gains.

It is important to understand the relationship between paid ads and natural searches. Together, they can build a strong foundation that your company cannot be successful without. In the short run, a paid ad campaign is beneficial because you will receive traffic almost immediately. With PPC, you can control the content of your ads and quickly make changes. On the other hand, organic search marketing is a tedious task and it may take many months before you see any results from your efforts.

Even though this strategy may not work for everyone, it is crucial to understand the synergy between these two approaches. Research has revealed that showing up for paid and organic results increases overall click through rates. Although natural results may get more clicks, they receive even more traffic when paired with an ad campaign. Also, paid ads get more clicks when you also show up in the organic search results. Not only will the number of clicks increase, but studies show that both efforts will help increase page views, conversions, quality of the visitors, and time spent on your site. So, before you make your final decision on what to focus on, don’t overlook the benefits of using both paid ads and organic search results!

Just heard through the search marketing grapevine that Google is starting to include local results for search queries that they think you’d like to see local results. Try a search for “cars” and half way down you’ll see local results based on where you’re searching. This is based off the IP of your computer where you’re searching from so if you’re surfing the net from your office and the network has a block of IPs from a provider out of state you will most likely receive results based off of where that IP is located.

So with this in mind it will become more important to make sure your business is listed in Google Local. Click here if you need to get listed in Google Local.

Well I contine to here more about Twitter and have started to get caught up in the buzz myself. As of this writing we have 518 followers and are following 2,000. In short, for you newbies out there that haven’t started tweeting, Twitter is a live way to follow other companies/individuals and also a way for yourself to update people following you with short blurbs (140 characters or less). We have actually hit a cap with the amount of companies/people we can follow. There’s nothing about this as far as I can tell on the Twitter site but after digging around online a bit I found that we have to increase our followers in order to follow more. I’m not sure exactly how many more followers we have to have but it’s a little frustrating at this point since I’m continuing to come across others I’d like to add to our company twitter profile. After reading a great article by Guy Kawasaki who we follow on Twitter, How To Use Twitter as Twool (a must read if you’re interested in Twitter), I was compelled to setup a twitter account for my name as well so I can start gathering a following and following others with my name, Matt Ramage (Click my name if you’d like to follow me!). This was just setup last night so no jokes on how I have no followers at the moment. Guy, in case you don’t know, is a successful author/blogger who has a huge following on Twitter! Over 41k following him at this moment. Guy also runs an online magazine I just discovered yesterday called Alltop which is basically a huge RSS feed of resources from various magazines.

Back to the Twitter buzz! Sites are now poping up to provide various services to enhance your Twitter experience. You can read about the main ones if you click the article that Guy wrote above. There are stand alone applications and also extensions you can add to your browser to help with notifications, managing multiple twitter profiles, reading twitts, and much more. emarketed has also setup a stand alone Twitter feed blog using WordPress and twitter feed so that every time we update twitter our blog gets posted to with fresh content for the search engines. We also have this same feed working off this blog so that everytime we post to our search marketing blog it will post on Twitter with a link to our new blog post. Well that’s it for now on Twitter. I’ll let Guy show you some other helpful Twitter Tips!

If you found this blog post helpful please start following us on Twitter by clicking here or inviting your friends to follow us if you’re already an emarketed follower.

Well if you’re still not convinced that YouTube and video marketing is important to your search marketing campaign the below numbers will blow you away. The Google properties (just in case you didn’t know, Google bought YouTube several years ago for several billion dollars) tallied over 100 million video views in October, 99.5 million of which were on YouTube.

In the upcoming months we will be blogging more in depth on how to drive traffic to your site and/or blog through video marketing. There are millions of potential customers on YouTube and we hope to help our readers crack the YouTube code on website video marketing. Stay tuned!